Rules are for the ruled. This seemingly trite aphorism is, in fact, the first principle of Utter Domination, from which all else flows.

An Evil Overlord must never allow another to set for them the boundaries of anything, be they tests, or socially acceptable behavior, or sovereign nations. They must have a Vision, and the greater the Vision, the more toes will inevitably be stepped on. Or heads chopped off, or nations being wiped from the map, whatever. You get the idea.

Now what this does not mean is that a hopeful overlord will break the rules simply because they are the rules. That’s what toddlers do, and get punished for. Adults who do it end up in dungeons or the hangman’s noose. Honestly, I shouldn’t have to explain that, but it keeps coming up.

Here’s a question to ask yourself before doing something antisocial/felonious/act of war-ish: Will doing what I’m contemplating put me closer to my goals, or closer to an executioner?

When you’ve got your answer, act accordingly.

~ ~ ~

Imagine, if you will, stepping out of a monastery (or a nunnery) at the age of twenty, knowing virtually nothing of how the world works, into the largest city on the continent. You’ve got a little money in your pocket, and if there’s one thing you’ve become very sure of over the course of your life, it’s that religion is fake.

Yeah, you’re going to find trouble.

For me, in the course of my first three months as the market-goer for the Scriptorium, I managed to amass a stunning collection of gambling debts. Oh, there were many other debts as well, of varying species and amounts, but the mountain of gambling debt dwarfed everything else.

You see, it proved to be unwise to shut a country lad up in a monastery until he became an adult and teach him nothing of how the world actually worked, and then one day send him out into the largest, most morally challenged city in the kingdom all on his own.

This is not an excuse, mind you. Evil Overlords do not make excuses. Besides the fact that we rarely find ourselves in a situation where we need an excuse for our actions, it’s just bad form, isn’t it? No Evil Overlord worth his salt is going to accept excuses from his or her minions, and it’s only fair that we hold ourselves to the same standard, if you ask me.

What it is, is an explanation.

Concise, truthful explanations lead to understanding, and understanding is the first step to the successful completion of any endeavour. Especially Utter Domination.

You should probably make a note of that.

At any rate, the doddering old codgers before me had taken all day to go down to the market, make their purchases, and return. I discovered on my first day that, even dawdling, I could finish up and return in an hour.

I didn't, of course. Return in an hour, that is. I'd been the next thing to a prisoner for a dozen years. I was twenty years old. And I was a virgin.

That first day I spent most of the marketing money on a lady of the evening. Well, technically it was morning, but you understand what I mean. It was, to put it bluntly, an awesome, life-changing experience, even if I didn’t technically manage to consummate the transaction. Don't judge me. I'd lived exclusively with smelly old men for more than half my life.

While I didn’t manage to experience the entire, uh, experience, as it were, I saw and did enough to know that I definitely wanted to do it again. Many times. As many times as possible, really. With as many women as I could scare up the coin for. I was aware, of course, that relationships existed where no money changed hands in exchange for penis-vagina interaction, but I had only the haziest, father Viker-bestowed ideas on how to go about securing such a relationship. ‘Find a girl with low self-esteem’ sounds relatively straightforward, but it’s not like they wear signs.

Gaining the necessary, practical knowledge to go about getting into a relationship that didn’t cost seemed like a terrible waste of time given the quick, coin-lubricated alternative.

As awesome – and criminally brief - as that first experience might have been, it put me in something of a dilemma. I had almost no money left to buy food for the old codgers. If I returned to the Scriptorium without money or food, my first day on the job would also be my last.

I very much did not want to lose the job.

To make a long story short, there was a man in the market with three cups and a ball at a small, portable table. People bet money on which cup the ball was under after he moved them around very quickly. It seemed quite an easy bet. At first I won. Then I lost. Then the nice man introduced me to the concept of “double or nothing” and thirty seconds later, for the first time in my life, I discovered debt.

And people call me evil.

I broke into tears. I explained my situation to the nice man, and he was very sympathetic. He even loaned me enough of my money back to make my purchases for the Scriptorium.

Then the man – Lorn was his name - introduced me to the concept of monetary interest, and to his brother, who had lots of muscles and scars and tattoos and bits of shiny metal piercing his skin in various uncomfortable places. Then he sent me on my way, saying that he very much hoped he would see me the next day, and that I would bring him something of value. Or else.

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It took a few days and several instructive beatings for Lorn and his brother to educate me on what they considered to be valuable. They never hit me in the face, though, give them credit for that. The Scriptorium didn’t have much in the way of wealth, at least not much that was portable, pilferable and obviously valuable. Gold leaf was worth surprisingly little, as an example, and the brothers definitely noticed when it went missing. Illuminated manuscripts were the hot item that was produced in the Scriptorium, after all.

Other items were more valuable, but less easily transformed into hard cash. The ingredients for certain inks were quite rare. Lorn, being rather a clever fellow, helpfully pointed me towards Scribe Alley when I brought him the small sack of boyne beetle carapaces, from which the best red inks got their color.

Through trial and error, I managed to pay off my debt in a couple of weeks. But swiping the materials the brothers worked with on a daily basis wasn’t what you would call a sustainable criminal enterprise. The more things went missing, the more attention was called to the fact that things were going missing, if you understand me. I wanted to make sure I had the marketing duty for as long as Maugrim continued to draw breath, and getting caught swiping rare and expensive tools of the trade would definitely put an end to my newfound life of freedom.

Fortunately, the Scriptorium had one thing that was portable, pawnable, and almost never inventoried – books.

The books that the brothers copied were all destined for either temples and kirks across the kingdom and beyond, or for rich lords and merchants who wanted to be seen as pious. Sometimes a book was commissioned but never collected. Sometimes the book was rejected due to some tiny flaw. Sometimes a book went out of favour due to some decree from a new Primate of the Light. For a dozen different and mostly stupid reasons, the Scriptorium had whole rooms full of books that were orphaned. And that isn’t even counting the forbidden books.

My marketing basket was big; big enough to hold two or three orphaned books when I went out in the morning, and Bookseller’s Row was only a brisk fifteen minutes’ walk from the Grand Plaza. I quickly made up for my unpromising first day outside the Scriptorium. Within the month, after I had managed to satisfy Lorn and his violence-prone bother, I was a regular feature at the gaming tables of the Bitten Coin, as well as the various ‘retiring rooms’ of the Sweetest Peach. There were other houses of ill-repute that I frequented, but those two quickly became my favorite haunts. I spent many a pleasant hour at both, and they are probably my greatest regret concerning the fire.

What I’m getting at here is I was never cut out for the priesthood. If I’d had some pull, some breeding or connections, I’d have made a wonderful Autarch – never in my lifetime have I met someone as morally bankrupt as the Great Father, Primate of the Light. I’m in awe to this day how someone as depraved as he made it to the top of the heap of the great and good, as it were, even considering the advantages he was born with.

But as I mentioned, as ill-suited as I was to a lifetime’s service to the Light, I was not born with the dark wisdom I now possess.

Petals was a case in point.

She worked at the Peach. Her hair was a fiery red, her skin was pale as snow, her eyes put emeralds to shame. And she had an absolutely massive personality.

Also, her tits were huge, and just perfectly shaped, with a delightful dusting of freckles across their upper swells. I still think about them sometimes. Just… magical.

Where was I? Oh, right. On my first marketing day I had almost done the sex exactly one time before I met Petals. It was with a woman as old as my mother in a back alley, atop a crate full of irritable chickens. I didn’t catch her name. I also didn’t quite get my penis inserted before I ejaculated. The woman offered condolences, but no refund. The opposite of harsh but fair, really.

But back to Petals. I rented an hour of her time and a blessedly chicken-free room with a bed at, what was to me at the time, a staggering sum.

The same issue I had had previously reared its shameful head again, but I was twenty and I still had more than three quarters of an hour, and Petals was there offering what can only be described as expert encouragement and reassurance. Things eventually worked out.

Twice.

Books began disappearing from the Scriptorium at a markedly faster rate after Petals and I made each other’s acquaintance.

Perhaps a month into our association, Petals gave me some distressing news: she was pregnant, and the child was mine.

Now let me pause here a moment and give my younger, more naive self a little credit. I did not immediately believe her. I’d grown up on a farm. I understood how babies came about. And I was hardly oblivious to the fact that Petals’ stock in trade was doing the thing that caused babies to arise.

“How… how do you know it’s mine?” I asked her, and she burst into tears.

“What did I say?”

“Oh, Garkins-” yes, she called me Garkins “-there hasn’t been anyone else but you, since I met you!” She cried harder, causing her delightful cleavage to tremble. It almost distracted me from the ludicrousness of her claim. Almost. I went to put an arm around her and she put her head in my lap and sobbed.

“That seems… unlikely,” I finally managed.

“It’s true,” she told my crotch. “Since we met, I haven’t been able to bear the touch of another man. Ask any of the other girls. Mistress Hebane has threatened to throw me out on the street. She’s sure to do it once I begin to show.” The sobbing swelled. Other things swelled, despite the fact that I found myself terrified. I would be thrown out of the faith. I had no marketable skills whatsoever, beyond being able to read and write. In short, I was fucked. But I put on a brave face for Petals.

“All right, dearest, calm yourself. I’ll think of something. Perhaps I can find work-”

She shot up, her eyes alarmed.

“You can’t be thinking of leaving the Light!” she said.

“What other choice do we have?”

Almost, she rolled her eyes. Or so hindsight informs me.

“There’s an alchemist, Garkins. One of the girls told me. He can make the pregnancy… go away. But his potions cost dear.”

“How dear, dear?” I asked. I was ready to loot the entire Scriptorium, if that’s what it took, and sell the brothers into slavery. I did not want to be a father.

She told me, and I blanched. But this was my beautiful, buxom, absolutely filthy in bed Petals. I swore to her that I would have the required sum before the week was out. And I did.

Soon after, Petals was wearing costlier silks and perfumes, which you think would have given me a hint. But it wasn’t until I noticed the other girls giggling every time they saw me that I finally realized that I had been taken for a fool.

I made no scene. At first I wanted to crawl under a rock, there to expire from embarrassment. Instead, I started spending coin on the other women of the Peach, and of the Silken Stocking, and of the – well, you get the idea.

I resolved to take Petal’s perfidy as a trio of lessons, one that every Evil Overlord must at some time endure: Trust only yourself. Smother generous impulses. And never let passion, or any emotion really, cloud your judgment.

That last one is a hard lesson to learn, and it took me many rounds of instruction and several years before it finally sank in. Evil Overlords are still human after all. Well, most of us, anyway.